“Hail first to thee, Baal-Eschmoun, the deliverer, whom the people of my country call Aesculapius! and to you, genii of the fountains, light, and woods! and to you, ye gods hidden beneath the mountains and in the caverns of the earth! and to you, strong men in shining armour who have set me free!”

And below it, a lovely Venetian window, complete with stone tracery, which used to look out on some view of the Temple of Aesculapius, perhaps; but now it is filled in by a modern window-frame which looks through the same window in the opposite direction, out into the alleyway which, perhaps, used to be a corridor.

This is no invention on the spur of the moment; nearly three years since, in a public discourse on the greatness of Aesculapius delivered by me during the first days of my residence at Oea, I made the same boast and recounted the number of the mysteries I knew.

I acknowledge it a most noble and divine science, in so much that Apollo, Aesculapius, and the first founders of it, merito pro diis habiti, were worthily counted gods by succeeding ages, for the excellency of their invention.